Media consumption has increased tremendously over the last few years. Today, users can download or stream media in various forms, such as video and audio data, to their computers and mobile telephones for consumption and rendering therein. The traditional approach of such media content delivery and rendering has been to visit a web page of a content provider by a web browser implemented in the computer or mobile telephone. The user selects a particular media content that is available at the content provider to download or stream the media content to the computer or mobile telephone for rendering therein.
If the user, however, would like to consume the selected media content on another user device or terminal than the one that was used to order the media content, he or she generally has to perform a number of manual steps which are cumbersome or sometimes difficult. In particular, the user has to download the media content using the computer or mobile telephone and then transfer it to the device he or she would like to use for conducting the actual play back or rendering of the media. Additional problems can also occur in terms of the need for transcoding the media content into a suitable format that is required by the selected media rendering device.
There is therefore a need for a solution of providing an efficient delivery of media content to a media rendering device that can be different from the user terminal used for selecting and ordering media. Such a solution is in particular desired in the light of the emerging trend of providing media consumption in local networks as standardized by the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), where DLNA compatible user equipment and devices are able to communicate with each other via Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) and share media between the devices.